Youth, passion, seduction and fear were the themes portrayed Tuesday night as one of France’s most distinguished modern dance companies, the Lyon Opera Ballet, graced the stage in Mershon Auditorium.
The three-part contemporary dance performance was set to music by the renowned French composer Maurice Ravel.
“Ravel did write music specifically for the ballet, but those are pieces that the Lyon Opera Ballet generally will avoid this evening,” said Arved Ashby, an assistant professor of music, in a lecture held before the show. “They are taking up works that generally Ravel did not write for ballet and putting them on stage.”
The featured pieces used in accompaniment to the dances included Ravel’s “Menuet” from “Le tombeau de Couperin,” “Pavane pour una infante défunte,” “Gaspard de la nuit” and, quite possibly his most famous, “Boléro.”
Ravel felt most liberated when he wrote dances, Ashby said. He labored intensively for years, painfully exerting himself in the attempt to create musical spontaneity and stylistic artifice. That the very impression of spontaneity took him a great deal of time and work is interesting, he said.
The Lyon Opera Ballet highlighted such spontaneity and child-like exuberance in the first dance selection, “Un Ballo.” Choreographed by Jiri Kylián of the Netherlands, “Un Ballo” can be interpreted as representing a traditional, yet romantic, ballroom dance between male and female partners.
“That piece definitely springs to mind images of courtship, but I think that it was really just about the delight in partnering with all of its intricacies and variations,” said Chuck Helm, director of performing arts at the Wexner Center. The theme of ballroom dancing “symbolized a kind of a formalized form of courtship,” he said.
The second segment of program, called “Gaspard,” was by the up- and-coming Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen.
“I am greatly inspired by the piece’s ‘dualism,'” Saarinen said. “While tender and beautiful in appearance, indeed inviting in meditation, it turns into drama, mixing seduction with passion, even horror.”
“Gaspard” was definitively the most experimental portion of the program. The dancers began with very childish, almost puppet-like movements, gradually escalating into more dark, sinister and disturbing dance styles.
“‘Gaspard’ really shows Lyon Opera Ballet’s dedication to giving young choreographers the platform to do more ambitious works,” Helm said.
Australian Meryl Tankard choreographed the final dance sequence of the evening. The 12-minute “Boléro” was set behind a filtering curtain of screens. The use of color, lighting and shadowplay allowed the dancers to achieve a surreal sort of presence on stage. The varying proportions of the shadowed silhouettes of the performers overlapping in intensity and dynamics gave the entire piece a cinematic effect.
“Meryl is known for her bold visual statements. I think that “Boléro” has all of that and more,” Helm said. “The way she juxtaposed the scale, the sharpness of focus, the increasing overlapping of images as the crescendo built – it was something amazingly innovative to watch.”
The Lyon Opera Ballet showcases contemporary and innovative dance styles. Initially there was some resistance among the corps of dancers because the choreography often went well outside the traditional spectrum of ballet techniques. Since then, changes have been made within the company to ensure that all the dancers were open to experimentation and modern ideas.
“I think that the texture of the evening really showed a nice dynamic in terms of the balance of approaches choreographers took toward Ravel,” Helm said. “The dancers were superb. It was all very fresh ideas for the staging and was very well executed.”
